10 Kmart stores, 1 Sears location in Michigan to close

Garden City store — retailer's very first — among those
in parent company's plan stay afloat

10 Kmart stores and one Sears store in Michigan will be among 150 stores nationwide that parent company Sears Holdings Inc. announced Wednesday that is closing.

10 Kmart stores and one Sears store in Michigan will be among 150 stores that parent company Sears Holdings Inc. is closing nationwide.

The company said Wednesday in a statement that Kmart stores in Plymouth, Roseville, Waterford Township, Westland, Garden City, Jackson, Adrian, Lansing, Muskegon and Acme Township will close. In addition, Grand Rapids will lose a Sears store.

The Garden City store, the first Kmart opened by what was then Detroit-based S.S. Kresge Co., opened in 1962.

The company would not specify how many jobs would be affected.

"Many of these stores have struggled with their financial performance for years and we have kept them open to maintain local jobs and in the hopes that they would turn around," the company said in a statement. "But in order to meet our objective of returning to profitability, we have to make tough decisions and will continue to do so, which will give our better performing stores a chance at success."

Kmart and Sears stores have struggled with a consumer shift toward online shopping, tough competition from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp., and what analysts have decried as a cycle of underinvestment in stores, which many shoppers see as tired or lacking inventory.

Earlier Wednesday, the company said it had agreed to a $500 million loan from Sears Holdings CEO Eddie Lampert, secured by Sears properties, to help it stay afloat. It was Lampert who in 2004 engineered the combination of Troy-based Kmart Corp. and Hoffman Estates, Ill.- based Sears, only a year after Kmart exited a much-publicized bankruptcy. The parent company later centralized headquarters operations in Illinois. The Kmart headquarters on Big Beaver Road remains vacant.

The company said liquidation sales will being as early as Friday at all stores scheduled to close.